Pathfinder Adventure Path: Curse of the Crimson Throne, Chapter Two: "Seven Days to the Grave" [RPG]

 

NO SPOILERS

I had a blast running "Seven Days to the Grave."  It's a well-written, memorable adventure that is definitely something different from the norm.  It does an excellent job continuing the overall AP storyline while simultaneously giving the PCs the chance to see how their efforts are making a difference.  I'll have a lot more to say below, but for now, we'll just cover the non-spoilerly back matter.

The back matter consists of five parts:

* "Plague and Pestilence: Diseases of Fantasy and Reality" (6 pages): This section contains a discussion of how diseases operate in Golarion and similar quasi-medieval fantasy worlds.  Much of it is fairly general, but it's well-written and interesting.  On the crunchier side of things, there are rules for how common "plague doctor" equipment functions and descriptions & stats for several diseases (both real ones and completely fictional ones).  

* "Abadar: Master of the First Vault" (8 pages): We get a thorough overview here of the Church of Abadar--including its tenets, temples, myths, holidays, the role of clerics and paladins, and even a sample temple layout.  I like the idea of the First Vault (it reminds me of the concept of Platonic forms).  A new prestige class is introduced, the Justiciar, but, oddly, it only has three levels to it (some cool features though!)  Although I'm sure a lot of material in this entry makes its ways to books like Inner Sea Faiths, there would be some parts that doesn't for space reasons--so these original overviews are still valuable.

* "Pathfinder's Journal: The Bloodworks Incident" (6 pages): Pathfinder Eando Kline's quest to see where his mysterious magical compass is leading him continues.  In this installment, Eando finds himself in the anarchic orc city of Urglin because he wants to find a guide to help him safely traverse the Hold of Belkzen.  The story features the Bloodworks arena and is really exciting, as the action scenes come alive and are suitably brutal.  Beyond that, the story does a great job describing Urglin and providing a feel for the city--a valuable resource for a GM.

* "Bestiary" (12 pages): This issue's bestiary starts with a random encounter table for Korvosa's crypts.  It then introduces five new monsters, each of which receives a two-page spread.  The first (and my favourite) is the leukodaemon, a daemonic harbinger of disease.  The artwork is awesome, and the creature serves a clear role in the setting and has some cool abilities (like the "breath of flies").  Next up is the Daughter of Urgathoa--a solid concept, but the anime-style artwork lets it down.  Third, we have Giant Flies & Giant Maggots; pretty simplistic, but I'd guess they'd be useful for something like a visit to the Worldwound or Abaddon.  Fourth, we meet the Herald of Abadar, the Lawgiver; Golarion doesn't seem to do much with heralds compared to the Forgotten Realms, so this is of limited usefulness.  Last, we get nosferatu--ancient, less "civilized" vampires--a good addition to the game.

* "Characters" (2 pages): Here we see Level 4 versions of the four Iconics in CotCT: Ezren, Seelah, Lem, and Harsk.

It's a strong collection of back matter, with a lot that's useful in and beyond the adventure itself.

SPOILERS!

Did you know the entire genesis of Curse of the Crimson Throne started with a pitch about doing a module centered around disease?  I had no idea until I read James Jacobs' fascinating foreword.  He writes about how disease often isn't a major factor in D&D stories because of how slow it spreads and the presence of magic that can easily cure it.  So the challenge facing Wes Schneider was how to make a disease-themed adventure viable, and that then inspired everything else around it.

The in-game background to "Seven Days to the Grave" involves Vorel's Phage--the supernatural toxin that plays a minor part in Chapter Two of Rise of the Runelords (I love subtle interconnections like this).  It turns out that after buying the poison that killed her husband from the Red Mantis, Ileosa has hired them again to help "cleanse the city of undesirables".  The Red Mantis have had one of their disease specialists, Reinder Davaulus, work with the Cult of Urgathoa (the deity of pestilence) to modify Vorel's Phage into a virulent disease called "blood veil."  In this chapter of the adventure, blood veil is released in Korvosa, and it's up to the PCs to try to discover a cure as more and more bodies rack up every day around them.  Was it a bit weird to run this adventure in the midst of a real-life pandemic?  Honestly, I never really thought about it at the time . . .

In Part One ("Infection"), the PCs are expected to enjoy some downtime after the events of Chapter One and continue to build their own connections with residents--a great idea to help make them care about Korvosa.  The adventure proper starts with a ship being sunk in the harbor because it arrived at night and ignored signals to stop.  Soon after, the PCs are contacted by Grau Soldado with an urgent request for help because his niece has become sick with a mysterious disease and the family can't afford to buy a magical cure.  Assuming they're willing to try to help, they'll meet a cleric of Abadar who has become worried because additional cases of the same illness are popping up around the city.

Part Two ("A Damsel in Distress") has Vencarlo Orisini contact the PCs for help in smuggling Trinia Sabor out of Korvosa.  I guess the idea here is to keep Vencarlo in the group's mind, but there's no real risk or drama with smuggling her to safety, so it's a relatively minor part of the adventure.

Part Three ("Outbreak") shows blood veil becoming a major threat across the city.  There are crazy rumors about how the disease spreads and how it started, people turning on each other, quarantines, quack cures, doctors getting sick themselves, hospitals overrun, supplies exhausted--oh, and all that happens in the adventure, too!  The PCs meet, for the first time, the "Queen's Physicians" (suitably creepy in proboscis-like plague masks) and Ileosa's personal army, the Gray Maidens.  It should be noted that the risk of the PCs themselves catching blood veil is very real, and this isn't a disease that's easy to cure.

Part Four ("Pestilence") has the disease intensifying.  This section is my favourite because it contains five different encounters that can be run in whatever order the GM wishes, and with hooks that are easy to personalise to the group.  There's an encounter against vampires taking advantage of all the bodies in the streets to mask their own feeding, a perfumery selling fake cures, wererats planning reprisals after being blamed for the plague, a fun little "zombie movie" set piece in a fancy manor, and an underwater exploration of the sunken ship (I'm still a bit fuzzy about the bad guys' plan here, but it made for an interesting challenge for the PCs).  Having multiple potential adventure hooks active in a dynamic environment around them means there's absolutely no concern about "railroading" while still giving the GM some structure to work with.

Part Five ("Epidemic") contains the big climax of the chapter.  The PCs will have suspected that the Queen's Physicians are actually spreading the disease, not trying to contain it, and will have learned their headquarters is the "Hospice of the Blessed Maiden".  But they have a lot more than fake doctors to contend with, as underneath the building, a Temple to Urgathoa has been secretly constructed!  This is definitely one of those situations where, if the PCs just kinda bust in, they'll alert various scattered defenders and turn a series of small encounters into a few very large and more dangerous ones.  One encounter I particularly liked was with a nosferatu who isn't actually interested in fighting, and very willing to make a deal with the PCs to leave peacefully--but if the PCs insist on fighting him, they'll be very unpleasantly surprised by how tough he is; it's a good reminder that sometimes non-violent ways to resolve encounters are smart.  The big boss battle, against the head priestess of the temple, has one of those sequences common in video games but very rare in tabletop RPGs: when the priestess is killed, she's reborn, a round later, as a "Daughter of Urgathoa" that's even more dangerous!  It's not a trope I would want to see often, but it was a fun surprise here.  Interestingly, Rolth (the necromancer) is present here, but this is before the hardcover collected edition turned him into "Rolth Lamm" and gave him a link to Gaedren Lamm.

The Conclusion gauges how many citizens the PCs saved by their efforts through a sort of success chart, and provides them with rewards accordingly.

All in all, an excellent adventure that feeds organically into Chapter Three.